Secret email about the Post Office Scandal. Shh!

Post Office scandal: Select Committee report drops, Read’s £1m salary demands and Jo at the Brits!

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Good morning

After toying with leaving, and then deciding to stick with my current newsletter editing software for the rest of the year I fell foul of one of its tiny but important quirks. It doesn’t autosave.

Between 4.30am and 5.30am this morning I spent an hour crafting what would, I am sure, have been some award-winning informative prose. Then I clicked on something by mistake and off it all went into the ether, never to be recovered.

Save as you go along, they used to say, in the noughties, before every app and platform except this one recognised the propensity for humans to do silly things and developed autosave. I blame myself. No I don’t

So, anyway… welcome to Version Two of this week’s Post Office scandal newsletter. Will it be any better than the Lost Version One? I guess we’ll never know.

Parliamentary Byrne

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Liam Byrne MP, Chair of the Business Select Committee

The big news this week once more came out of parliament as Liam Byrne’s business select committee rush-released its report into the board-level dysfunction at the Post Office and the mystifying approach to compensation adopted by both the Post Office and the government.

The report wants the Post Office removed from any involvement in compensation payments and finds that Post Office CEO Nick Read managed to mislead parliament twice, firstly over the Post Office’s use of non-disclosure agreements and secondly over the Post Office’s use of public relations firms. It is silent on the issue of whether Read denying he had tried to resign was an attempted to mislead parliament.

The report makes clear that initial offers of compensation by the Post Office and government are “insultingly low” and demands “legal timeframes to deliver redress to sub-postmasters” and wants legislation to introduce “binding timeframes for each stage of a compensation claim, with financial penalties awarded to the claimant for failure to meet those deadlines” as suggested by one Alan Bates in his evidence to the committee.

Read the report here. Watch former Subpostmaster Noel Thomas’s reaction to it all on ITV News Wales here.

Nick Read’s hunger for cash

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Nick Read at last week’s select committee hearing

Last weekend the Sunday Times reported on Nick Read’s apparent insatiable desire for a pay rise which might take his salary into seven figures, with the headline screaming “Pay me £1m or I quit

The ST reports “staff” telling of Read’s “wrath” as he “threatened to resign multiple times and demanded a pay package of more than £1 million”.

The ST piece was followed up in The Times on Wednesday by Tom Witherow who confirmed that the 80-page “speak up” dossier waved around at the select committee last week by Henry Staunton was written by former HR Director Jane Davies (pictured).

Davies told Witherow the complaints in her dossier were solely about Nick Read and that Henry Staunton wasn’t even mentioned by name.

This contrasts with the Post Office’s assertion that the dossier contains “a number” of allegations against others.

“The Post Office is misrepresenting the speak-up dossier,” said Davies’ spokesperson, “it was not directed at anyone other than Nick Read.”

Contrast Read’s demands with the lot of frontline Post Office workers. Many are severely underpaid for the work they do. This tweet thread from Postmaster Sean Hudson is revealing.

On the day the Business Select Committee published its report there was an opportunity for Liam Byrne to follow it up in the House of Commons chamber. He asked the government if it still had “full confidence in Nick Read as the chief executive of the Post Office to run the redress schemes currently under way?

Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake replied:

“All the recommendations he makes in that report we have either fixed or are fixing with the assistance of the Horizon compensation advisory board. We agree with him that we need to bring the compensation schemes in house. The GLO – group litigation order – scheme is already being delivered by the Department for Business and Trade.

“We believe that further compensation will flow from our overturning of convictions. We will be overturning hundreds of convictions through legislation in this House very shortly, as quickly as possible, and that will provide a flow of hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation for those individuals. That will be done by the Department for Business and Trade.”

Hamilton goes pop!

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Jo Hamilton (l) and Monica Dolan at The Brits!

One of the more surreal cultural reverberations generated by Mr Bates vs The Post Office came on Saturday night at the Brits. Former Subpostmaster Jo Hamilton popped up on stage with her dramatic doppelgänger Monica Dolan to present the singer Raye with the first award of the evening for Single of the Year. Hamilton said:

“I want to thank everyone in the country for the love and the support they have given the postmasters. Please can you keep on supporting us because, despite what the government says, they’re not paying the postmasters.”

Raye’s winning song is called Escapism. Listen to it here if you have Spotify and don’t mind swearing and drug and sex references (if that won’t persuade you to listen, nothing will).

Jo has admitted to feelings of “survivor’s guilt” after being one of the few high-profile campaigners to have settled her case with the government. This might be understandable, but Jo has nothing to feel guilty about, having dedicated so much of her life not just to campaigning for other people but looking after them as well. Jo is an extraordinary woman and I pay tribute to her.

Hamilton in Action

Jo also popped up on Joshua Rozenberg’s excellent Law in Action series for BBC Radio 4. This was a special edition of the programme investigating the role of lawyers in the scandal. You can listen to it here and read about it in Joshua’s accompanying substack post here.

Whilst we’re on the subject of lawyers and substacks could I recommend Professor Richard Moorhead’s fisking of the Post Office’s Phase 4 closing written submissions to the Inquiry. Whilst most journalists understandably focused on the submission from Hodge Jones and Allen, (in which Ed Henry KC and Flora Page name those individuals it believes acted unlawfully in this scandal), Moorhead has a look at the Post Office’s current thinking on its culpability, by way of its closing submissions to Phase 4.

To give you a little flavour of Moorhead’s thinking, he notes the Post Office suggests: “false accounting and theft could be properly charged in many cases if a sophisticated view was taken of the relationship between theft and false accounting. A trouble with this is the view appears to have escaped the head of their own criminal department. As with Bates, at times the submissions here veered into the theoretical rather than actual; whilst they say Mr Wilson [former Head of Criminal Law at the Post Office] may have been confused, I would say they are trying to look beyond what actually happened to provide a justification as to what could have happened if they were given the benefit of substantial doubt and without any evidence to support it.”

Out of my tech

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On Wednesday this week I had the pleasure of working with Jason Coyne, the specialist technical wizz who was the claimants’ IT expert witness in Bates v Post Office.

We were invited to the Tech Show London at the Excel arena to talk about the Horizon IT scandal, Jason’s work on it and what any business leaders in the audience could learn from the disaster.

Jason is great company and we were well looked after by the team running the event. You can read a write-up of what was said by the AI Business newsletter here.

Jason also features in Computer Weekly this week with his comments about the rollout of Horizon and how Subpostmasters were essentially used as “guinea pigs” for the new system with “frightening” consequences.

It was also great to meet up with my own tech guru and secret emailer Andrew who powers the Post Office Scandal website. We discussed some tweaks to the layout and how to potentially improve the distribution of this newsletter. Next time, I hope he can teach me how to switch autosave on.

Have a great weekend. I’ll be back with more next week.

Yours

Nick


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